Welcome to In Conversation, the regular podcast of InCompass. Go to InCompass-Hevon Europe.com for free access to all our podcasts to date. This is Paul Adamson and I'm in conversation with Calypso Nicolades.

Calypso Nicolades is Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford.

We're here to talk about your new book, your latest book, Calypso, Exodus, Reckoning, Sacrifice,

three meanings of Brexit.

This is not a typical book about Brexit.

You're very cleverly and very imaginatively and very creatively weave in aspects of Greek mythology

to sort of retell the Brexit story. So take us through the three scenarios. First of all, starting

with Exodus. Actually, Exodus is the first story and the dominant story from the beginning,

which is not from Greece, but came way before,

right? This is mackled people leaving the pharaoh slash Brussels to go to their promised land

of milk and honey. That's not been stamped by the common agricultural policy. And in doing that,

they say, let the people go. So this is the ex story, and an Exodus story that allows the Brits to tell themselves

that there may be 40 years of wilderness, maybe a bit less long, but it is in the wilderness

that the tribes become a people, that the covenant happens, that maybe the UK will be united again.

So this is the sense in which maybe we should understand that it doesn't matter when you talk

about castes and rational stories. At the end, you want the sea to open and you want to be

on the other side. And of course, Europeans watching this end up saying

because there's so much Brexit fatigue, the same thing. It is a British problem. It is a British

responsibility. But let the people go. That's the first story. But can I add that in that story, Paul, I do put in a bit of Greek myth already, a foretaste.

And that foretaste for me is very important.

It is the moment when I ask, actually, if we step back, what Europe are the Brits really

leaving?

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